live arcade

Live Arcade is a great service and, as this year’s GDC made abundantly clear, a great way for indie developers to get their games to the masses. In fact the central theme of the conference and almost the entirety of Microsoft’s contribution was to drive that fact home. It’s ironic then that Portal, the game awarded Game of the Year at the very conference, was rejected for XBLA distribution.

“We’d love to do that. Right now it’s something we’d love to do. I’d love to sell Portal on Xbox live,” said Doug Lombardi, marketing director at Valve. “[But] the platform holders aren’t doing that right now. There’s a size limit and all kinds of other things.

“We’ve asked them, we said we were open to it. So it’s a decision for the platform holder and how they want to make the games available and how much bandwidth they want to [allow].”

So apparently it’s not a haven for indie games, just small, casual indie games. Developers with ambition are out of luck even if they make one of the best games, indie or otherwise, in years. Kinda disappointing but maybe this news will prompt Microsoft to further raise their size limit.